In the past, publishers generally produced written media at significant expense, working with a team of authors and editors to produce content on a particular topic. For example, magazines generally have a well-defined topic and are written by authors that are knowledgeable about the topic, and are edited to ensure the quality of the content. Posting written content through web logs (blogs) on the Internet has reduced the cost of producing and distributing written works to near zero, so that today anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can be a publisher of content. As a result, there has been an explosion in the number of authors producing web logs (blogging), and the number of posts by authors to those blogs.
The dramatic increase in the number of authors and the ease of distribution facilitated by blogging has given rise to a broad range of quality among blogs, as no publisher or team of editors typically reviews blog content. Readers are now faced with the problem of wading through numerous blogs to identify content that is worthwhile to read. Similarly, authors of blogs are interested in rising above the noise generated by the other blog authors. Authors want posts to their blogs to be widely read and carefully considered, particularly where the author has a high level of authority on the topics being written about.